Smoke-Free Campuses, Missouri State University

July 9th, 2012 by Isabela Mayer

As colleges and universities across the nation enforced smoke-free campuses, Missouri State University on Aug. 15 will take an important step in that direction when it revokes its 25 designated on-campus smoking regions. Still, that doesn’t mean MSU is taking the full tobacco-free fall. It will continue to permit smoking in special outdoor areas during athletic contests or events at the JQH Arena, the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts, the Robert W. Plaster Sports Complex (for football) and the 8,846-seat Hammons Student Center.

Earle Doman, vice president for student affairs, reported MSU has moved deliberatively on the smoking issue over the years.

“We are certainly not a trend-setter,” he argued. Other colleges and universities, for example, have gone “cold turkey,” he added.

According to the American Non-smokers’ Rights Foundation, there are 774 U.S. college campuses that are smoke-free, indoors and outdoors, without exemption.

Approximately 85 per cent of those schools became tobacco-free in the past five years, according to Ty Patterson, who helped make one of the first smoke-free campus policies in the nation while he was a vice president at Ozarks Technical Community College.

In general, Patterson explained that the dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke are lucid in our days.

Even during the past two years, Doman concluded, nonsmokers complained about tobacco smoke coming from the smoking designed areas, which are located away from the edifice entrances and exits.